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Titan Sues MonsterCockTube.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Gay production company Titan Media yesterday filed suit against Antelope Media LLC, operators of MonsterCockTube.com, and up to five John Doe defendants, for copyright infringement.

According to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the tube site had posted five video files of Titan material, which had been viewed more than 14,000 times.

“Yet another example of a site looking to make a quick buck and generate traffic from the intellectual property of others,” Titan Media Vice President Keith Webb told XBIZ. “We will not sit idly by and watch others pirate and profit from our content. Let this be a clear message to anyone running a tube site — if you have Titan content on your site you will be caught and pay the price.”

The lawsuit charges Arizona-based Antelope Media with willful copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair business practices, as well as subsequent charges of infringement for the video files containing Titan material that were hosted on the site.

The claims are similar to those filed in another lawsuit by Titan, on Aug. 13, against U.K.-based GayForIt.com and its operating company GLBT Limited, in which Titan has asked for a judgment of $2.7 million, based on the number of video files that were allegedly hosted by GayForIt.com, as well as the number of times they had been viewed.

Titan has asked for a jury trial in the case against Antelope Media.

With one of the most aggressive stances against piracy in the adult industry, Titan has never lost an infringement case. The company has filed close to 50 suits in nearly six years and, in 2006 alone, sent 318,000 cease-and-desist letters to alleged content pirates.

According to Titan in-house legal counsel Gill Sperlein, though the company success rate in collecting awarded compensation or settlements varies from case to case, the idea is to send a definite message to content pirates that if they infringe on Titan product and are found out, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Sperlein also said that the result of the company’s legal efforts is increased sales as well as consumer awareness of legitimately produced content.

“If you are a producer of adult content and your sales figures are down, you seriously need to ask yourself why anyone would buy your product if they can get it for free,” Sperlein said in a previous interview.

“For example, content from every other gay studio is available on bit torrent sites; Rapidshare [with links made available through blogs], eBay [illegal dupes], etc,” he added. “Until you stop that, you are going to lose sales to people who could be customers. And it is only going to get worse.”

Representatives for Antelope Media were not immediately available at the time of posting.